It is odd that when I search for this previous discussion, I could find no trace of it. We lost a lot of history when we changed to this website.It has been discussed and as you imply, it's less stress than pulling the aircraft back to level flight. I think the restrictions placed on XH558 actually preclude it.

Forget the hypothesis about stress, technique, risk, etc, etc.... there's one extraordinarily simple reason why 558 doesn't do a barrel roll, and never will. She's a display aircraft and not an aerobatic one, therefore is not permitted to do anything classed as aerobatics, lest anyone get into serious trouble. If she did go all the way round, the paperwork would probably make the collection engineering documentation look like light reading, and there'd probably be an immediate end to flying, never mind the person driving probably losing their licence!

I hadn't heard any ideas of the aircraft rolled by Falk at Farnborough being damaged by it, but the story goes that he was told very definitely never to do it again even though it was apparently agreed at the time is was safe to do and posed no risk to the airframe or the crowd. However, it was allegedly worrying the people on the ground (maybe it was an excuse or cover-up?). I presume it wasn't unheard of to roll production Vulcans as I'm sure somewhere I saw comments from ex flight crew suggesting the B1 marks rolled more easily than the B2. Oh, and Mike Bannister and his French equivalent rolled Concorde just because they could....

Logged

“If anybody ever tells you anything about an aeroplane which is so bloody complicated you can't understand it, take it from me: it's all balls.” — R. J. Mitchell

Government. If you think the problems they create are bad, you should see their solutions.

Forget the hypothesis about stress, technique, risk, etc, etc.... there's one extraordinarily simple reason why 558 doesn't do a barrel roll, and never will. She's a display aircraft and not an aerobatic one, therefore is not permitted to do anything classed as aerobatics, lest anyone get into serious trouble. If she did go all the way round, the paperwork would probably make the collection engineering documentation look like light reading, and there'd probably be an immediate end to flying, never mind the person driving probably losing their licence!

I hadn't heard any ideas of the aircraft rolled by Falk at Farnborough being damaged by it, but the story goes that he was told very definitely never to do it again even though it was apparently agreed at the time is was safe to do and posed no risk to the airframe or the crowd. However, it was allegedly worrying the people on the ground (maybe it was an excuse or cover-up?). I presume it wasn't unheard of to roll production Vulcans as I'm sure somewhere I saw comments from ex flight crew suggesting the B1 marks rolled more easily than the B2. Oh, and Mike Bannister and his French equivalent rolled Concorde just because they could....

I heard the reason Vulcans were prevented from rolling was that it happened once and the pilot was told off by someone wearing a lot of scrambled egg as it wasn't the sort of thing a bomber should be seen to be doing... I can easily believe that

Awesome bit of footage!Talking of Tony Blackman, in his book "Vulcan Test Pilot" he details the tragic events surrounding VULCAN VX770 which broke up in flight at the Syreston Air Show in 1958.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji24Rr1UWywThe aeroplane had not been with the RAF for very long, all 4 crew were lost in this accident and 3 safety personnel were killed on the ground.It has been hypothesised that this was a leading-edge failure which was caused by Pilots pushing their new toy to, and beyond, its limits once they were safely out of sight of their base. The damage had probably been caused well in advance of this event but only became apparent when they attempted a particularly fast flypast, (the plane was originally designed to fly pretty close to Mach 1 but at high altitude where there was much lower wind resistance).

Tony Blackman describes how Avro employed a diminutive engineer who used to regularly inspect the wings leading edge for structural failure from inside the wing, it seems likely that this information was not communicated to the RAF and they were not carrying out such rigorous visual checks between flights.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Syerston_Avro_Vulcan_crash

It was this type of daring flying,however, which probably convinced the RAF flyboys that they could emulate such antics safely in the Vulcans they'd just been given.

Roly Falk was, by that time, less a test pilot and more a Sales Executive. Avro was competing with Vickers & Handley Page for sales of V-Force bombers. Showing this super-heavy bomber handling like a fighter jet would probably have sealed the deal for potential future orders! (They'd call it 'sexing-up' the product today.)